“There’ll be light,” he said. “Every place I’ve read of this, there’s the light of the dead. We just have to get there. This is the route to the city, not the city proper. We should find it soon, Pete. Soon! And then perhaps I can lay Matthew to rest.”
“This is madness,” I said. Our voices were peculiarly dead in that subterranean place, consumed by the rock walls and the weird hieroglyphs. The etchings writhed in the weak light from Scott’s insubstantial torch, given a life of their own.
“Stay with me, Pete,” he said. He turned away and continued along the tunnel, heading down and away from the vanished light, perhaps leading us into places and dangers neither of us could truthfully imagine. “You’re my best friend.”
I followed because it was the only thing I could do. I like to think I stayed on his tail because of my devotion to my friend, my burgeoning sense of adventure, my excitement at what we may discover around the next curve in the corridor, or the next. But in reality I think I was simply scared. I could not face the walk back out on my own. Uphill. Past those strange markings on the wall, those bones that had no weight or touch.
I had no choice but to follow. We walked for what felt like hours. Scott’s torch had guttered down to little more than a blue smudge in the utter darkness. The new light that manifested came so slowly, so gradually, that for a while I could not understand how that failing torch was throwing out so much illumination. But this new light was growing and expanding, dusty and blue, originating from no single source. The walls of the passage began to glow, as if touched by the sticky early morning sun, and the shapes and tales carved there told differing stories as the shadows writhed and shifted. None of them were clear to me.
“Scott,” I said, afraid, more afraid than I had been since those first blasts of the storm had assaulted the tent walls.
“The light of the dead,” he said. “They need it to see. I guess they don’t like the dark. We’re almost there, Pete.”
Ahead of us the passage narrowed, walls closing in and ceiling dipping until we had to stoop to pass by. The ceiling touched my head once and I did not like the sensation; the rock was smooth and as warm as living flesh. I could not shake the idea that we were walking willingly into the belly of a beast, and now here we were at the base of its oesophagus, deep deep down, about to enter its stomach and submit ourselves to digestion.
There were more remains around our feet here, scattered across the ground offering no resistance as we waded through. The bones tumbled aside, clanking silently together, some falling into dust as soon as they were disturbed and others rolling together as if coveting their former cosy togetherness. I could not feel them. It was like kicking aside wafts of smoke. I wondered if they could feel me.
Scott was ahead of me. When I heard him gasp, and I walked into him, and his gasp came again as a groan, I knew that things were about to change. The claustrophobic passage opened out on to a small ledge, strewn with skeletal parts that seemed to dance away as we both came to a stunned standstill, looking forward, out, ahead of us at the place we had come down here to find.
I once stood on the viewing platform at the top of the Empire State Building in New York, looking down at the city surrounding me, the myriad streets and blocks crawling with people and cars, the mechanical streams spotted yellow with frequent taxis, sirens singing up out of the city like long-lost wailing souls, other high buildings near and far speckled with interior lights, the city rising in three dimensions, not just spread out like the carpet of humanity I imagined. I could look east towards the river and see a hot dog vendor stand at a road junction, and then south towards Greenwich Village, where through one of the telescopes I could just make out someone hurrying across a street with a dog tugging them along, and I knew that these two people may never meet. In a city of this size, there was a good chance that they would pass their lives without ever exchanging glances. And I, at the top of this huge tower, could see it all. I could see a fire to the east of Central Park, follow the course of fire engines screeching intermittently through the traffic, but wherever the owners of the burning building were I could not tell them. I had a strange feeling of being lifted way above the city, an observer rather than a player, and as I descended in the express elevator and exited once more on to the streets, I experienced a dislocation that lasted for the rest of the day. I glanced back up at the tower, and wondered just who was looking down at me right then.
What I saw in that place way below the desert was larger, older, and far less explicable.
The City of the Dead lay spread out before us. It was flat and utterly without limit, stretching way out farther than I could see, and it was sheer distance rather than anything else that faded it into the horizon. No hazy atmosphere, no darkening of the air – the light of the dead was rich and pure and all-encompassing, much more revealing and honest than mere sunlight – but pure, unbelievable distance. The city went on forever, and I could only see at the speed of light. It spread out left and right and ahead, the only visibly defined border being the high cliff from which we had emerged. The wall fell down to the city and rose up higher than I could see, and it faded similarly as I looked left and right. It did not seem to curve around, perhaps enclosing the city, but stood on a straight line, and here and there I spied other ledges and darker smudges which may have been the mouths of other tunnels. In the distance I thought I saw another shocked individual standing on one of these ledges, but I blinked and the image was taken away.
I looked down, trying to judge how far below the ground lay. Too far to climb but close enough to fall, I thought, and though I had no idea where the idea came from I looked at Scott, caught his eye, knew that he was thinking the same awful thing.
Together we stepped forward and tipped slowly over the lip of the ledge, leaning into space, somehow welcoming the plunge that would immerse us in this city.
The fall lasted long enough for me to make out plenty more detail. I did not dwell upon the strangeness of what was happening – right then, it did not seem important – and though I knew that things had changed irrevocably as Scott and I had set foot on that ledge, I took the opportunity offered to view this place. Here was the supposed City of the Dead. The buildings were hugely diverse, ranging from small shacks made of corrugated tin spread across branch uprights, to golden-domed offerings of love; steel and glass towers, to complex timber-clad settlements; frosty ice-sculptured homes, to hollows in the ground, caves, deep holes heated by the boiling insides of the hot earth itself. There was no order, no design to the city, no blocks or arrangement, merely buildings and the spaces in between. Here and there I saw wider areas that may have been parks, though there was no greenery to be seen. The things in these parks may have been dead trees, or simply much taller skeletons than any I had seen before. Some buildings had windows and some did not, and only some of those with windows retained their glazing. It was only as we fell closer to the city – and that fall, that plunge, was still accepted by both of us – that my attention was drawn more to the spaces in between the buildings.
In those spaces, things moved.
Until now I had seen this as a city of the dead, and I was falling towards it, and that did not matter.
Now, seeing this movement in the streets and roads and alleys and parks – seeing also the flittering movements behind the windows of the taller buildings, shadows denying the strange, level light that this place possessed – I came to dwell upon exactly what was happening to us. We fell, though there was no sensation of movement; no wind past my ears, no sickness in my stomach, no velocity. And soon, looking down, I knew that there was an impact to come. Directly below us was a collection of smaller, humped buildings, rising from the ground like insect hills, surrounded by taller constructions which even now we began to fall past.
“Scott!” I yelled, but even though I felt no breeze my voice was stolen away. He was next to me, spread-eagled in the air, and when he caught my eye he looked quickly away again. What that signified, I did not know.
/> The impact came closer, and then it was past. It did not hurt, and I had no memory at all of having landed. One second we were falling by tall buildings, flitting past windows which each seemed to hold a shadowy face observing our descent, and the next we were on the ground. Dust rose around us and floated in the still air, drifting up, up, as if eager to trace the paths of our recent descent. We lay there, watching the dust form ghostly shapes around us. Somehow, at the end of our fall, we had flipped over to land on our backs.
“We’re here,” Scott whispered. “Look.”
He did not point and I did not turn my head to see where he was looking. I did not need to. Because one of those ambiguous shapes suddenly became more real, emerging from the dust like sunbeams bursting through cloud cover, carrying a bluish light and forming a very definite shape as it passed first over Scott’s body, and then my own. The shape of a woman in long, flowing robes, her hair short and cropped, her hands held out before her as if forever warding off some horrible fate, and her foot touched my arm—
She sees it coming at her, the dog, the animal, whatever it is, she sees it and she sees the faces of those behind it, and they could be grimacing or laughing. She brings up her hands, as if that will do any good, and before the thing crashes into her in a rage of teeth and claws, she catches sight of the face of someone she had once loved in the gleeful crowd—
I scurried back, pushing with my feet until I was leaning against a stone wall, shaking my head to loosen the image. The wraith drifted away down the street and eventually faded into the uniform blue light that smothered this place. The wall at my back should have felt good, but it was merely more confirmation that this was somewhere that should not be, as was the solid ground, the ground that I had hit after minutes of falling. I glanced up, but the cliff wall was nowhere to be seen. Only that blue light.
“Are we alive?” I said, a sick fear suddenly sending me cold.
“Of course,” Scott said. “Do you remember dying?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t. We fell!”
“Everyone here remembers dying,” he said. “That’s why they’re here.”
“But why.”
“No more questions, Pete,” he said. “Just open your eyes to it all.”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
Scott reached down to help me up. His firm grip was comforting, and we held on to each other for a second or two as we stood there together, looking around. He was real to me and I was real to him, and right then that was very important. These buildings were real too. I kicked at the stone wall I had been leaning against. There was a dull thud and dust drifted from my tatty shoe. And I realized then, for the first time, how utterly silent it was.
Wherever we were, however deep below the ground or submerged in disbelief, there were no voices, no gusts of air, no sounds of a city, no movements, no breaths. My own heart started to sound excessively loud as it continued on its startled course, busy pumping oxygen through veins to dilute my fear and cool the heat of my distress. I was not used to existence without noise of some kind. At home, with a wife and two children sharing the house, there was always a raised voice or a mumbled dream, music or television adding a theme, toys being crashed or musical instruments adding their tone-deaf lilt to the air. Even at work, reading and editing, the voices in my mind were loud enough to be audible. Here, in this city larger than any I had ever seen or imagined, the complete silence was incongruous and unfair. And it made things so obviously false.
“We’re not really here,” I said. Scott ignored me. Perhaps in silence he was dealing with this in his own way.
There was an opening in the stone wall a few metres along, and I went to it and looked inside. I saw a room, large and high-ceilinged, bereft of anything – furniture, character, life. Four walls, a floor, a ceiling, nothing more. There were no signs of it ever having been used. There was a doorway in the far wall without a door, no glass in the window I looked through, no light fitting in the ceiling; the same uniform blue light lit every corner of the room, top and bottom, revealing nothing but slight drifts of dust. Shadows had no place here. I stood back slightly and looked up, realising that the building was maybe fifteen storeys tall, all of them identically holed with glassless windows, and I was certain that each room and floor was the same sterile, deserted emptiness.
Scott nudged against me as he walked by, and when I glanced down I realized that he had done so on purpose.
There were several more wraiths moving along the street. Two of them walked, strutting purposefully together, their expressions and facial features similar. They wore bathing shorts and nothing else, their torsos and limbs dark with suntan, faces young and strong and long, long dead. They did not touch each other as they strode by, and they exuded contempt, staring straight ahead and doing nothing to acknowledge the other’s closeness. Another shape seemed to float and spin through the air, but as she passed by I realized that she was falling horizontally, clothes ripped from her body by the invisible wind that whipped her hair around her head, face and shoulders. She may have been beautiful, but the forces crushing her this way and that were too cruel to tell. She passed over the heads of the striding brothers and cornered at the end of the street, her fall unimpeded. Two more shapes came by separately, neither of them appearing to notice us. One shouted silently and waved fists at the sky, and the other struggled on footless legs, stumping his way along and swinging his arms for balance, as if pushing through mud. One of his hands brushed mine, I saw it but did not feel it—
He was in the sea, trapped there by a giant clam that had closed around both feet, his muscles burning acid into his bones as he struggled to keep his nose high enough to snort in a desperate breath between waves, and even though the salt water was doing its best to blind him he could see the boat bobbing a few feet away, the faces peering over the edge, laughing so much as their tears of mirth fell to quicken his fate—
I gasped and pressed myself back against the wall, watching the dead man hobble away.
Scott had remained in the centre of the narrow street, staring about him as the new shapes breezed by. Perhaps they touched him, but he seemed not to have noticed. With the taste of brine still on my own lips I went to him, desperate to feel someone real again. I clapped my hand to his shoulder, held on hard, followed his gaze. High buildings, that blue light, no sign of where we had come from . . . and high up, sometimes, darker blue shapes sweeping by.
“What are they?” I asked.
“I don’t know. But Pete, Matthew is here. He has to be! I have to find him, and however long it takes . . .” He left the sentence unfinished, ominous with possibilities.
“These aren’t just ghosts,” I said.
“Not ghosts, no!” He shook his head as if frustrated at my naïveté. “Dead people, Pete.”
“There’s nothing to them!”
“Do you have to feel them for them to be real or mean anything? Can you touch your dreams, taste your imagination? They’re as real as we are, just not in quite the same place, the same way. And they’re here because they were wronged.”
“How could you know all this?”
“You think I haven’t been looking for this place?” he said. “Interrogating every scrap of ancient script I’ve discovered, or uncovered in some godforsaken old library somewhere? Tearing apart whole digs by hand to find a fragment of writing about it, a shred of evidence? Ever since I first got wind of this place the year Matthew died, it’s been my only reason to keep on living.”
“Matthew? Why . . .?”
He looked at me then, a quick glance, as if he was unwillingly to relinquish sight of our unbelievable surroundings. “I wasn’t there when he died.”
“He died of leukaemia, Scott,” I said.
“I should have been there.”
“You couldn’t have done anything! He died of leukaemia, just tell me what you could have done?”
He stared at me, but not for effect. He really could not understand why I w
as even asking. “I could have held his hand,” he said.
“You think your young son could hold that against you?”
“No, but I could. And that’s enough to keep him here.”
“You can’t know any of this!” I said, shaking my head, looking around at the impossible buildings with the occasional impossible shape floating, striding or crawling by. “You might think you do, but you’ve been—”
“Misled?” He said it mockingly, as if anyone could draw any sane idea from this place.
“No,” I said. “Not misled. Maybe just a little mad.”
“Do you see all this?” he asked.
“I don’t know what I see. It’s madness. My eyes are playing tricks, I’m drunk, I’m dreaming, I’m drugged. All of this is madness and—”
“You see the City of the Dead!” He grabbed my lapels and propelled me back against a wall, dust puffing out around me in an uneven halo. His shout tried to echo off between the buildings, but it was soon swallowed or absorbed, and it did not return. He did not shout again.
“Scott, please . . .” I felt a little madness closing in on myself. Some vague insulating layer of disbelief still hung around me, blurring the sharp edges and dangerous points of what I saw and what I could not believe. But beyond that layer lay something far more dangerous. I wondered if Scott was there already.
“Don’t ‘please’ me!” he said. “Matthew is here, trapped here, because of me! He could be there!” He pointed along the street at a large domed building, ran there, peered in through one of several triangular buildings. I followed after him and looked inside. There were shadows moving about, writhing across the floor like the dark echoes of snakes, passing through the blue light and somehow negating it with themselves.
“There’s only—”
“He could be there!” Scott said, running away from me again, dodging around a grey shape that stood wringing its hands. He passed by a row of squat-fronted buildings and ducked into a gap in the block, disappearing from view. I followed quickly and found him leaning over a low wall, looking down into the huge basement rooms that it skirted. “Down there, see?” Scott said. “He could so easily be down there!” I saw several shapes sitting on rough circular seats, each of them gesticulating and issuing silent shouts and pleas.
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